1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a scenario editing apparatus, and more particularly to a scenario editing apparatus for editing a scenario of a multi-media application.
2. Description of the Related Art
In editing of a scenario of a multi-media application, presentation information including the presentation position of at which position of a screen image data, text data, sound data or some other data should be each presented or to which data each such data should be presented in a side-by-side relationship, the presentation time of at what time each such data should be presented or next to which data each such data should be presented and the presentation effect of whether or not fade-in/fade-out should be performed upon presentation or whether or not wiping processing should be performed upon changing over of the screen, must be designated. Further, upon editing a scenario of a large-scale multi-media application, in order to allow such presentation information as described above to be designated collectively, a template of the presentation information must be produced.
Such a scenario editing apparatus as shown in FIG. 10 is conventionally known.
Referring to FIG. 10, the conventional scenario editing apparatus shown includes a scenario template production section 11 for producing a scenario template including the number of data which is an object of the template and, the types of the media, presentation timing information and presentation effect information of each data, a scenario template storage section 12 for storing scenario templates produced by the scenario template production section 11, a media data storage section 13 for storing data identifiers (IDs) for identification of presentation data, the types of the media, the sizes, the times, keywords and so forth, a scenario production section 14 for selecting a scenario template to be used from among the scenario templates stored in the scenario template storage section 12 and selecting data to be presented from among the data stored in the media data storage section 13 to produce a scenario in which the number of the selected scenario template and the data ID are related to each other, a scenario storage section 15 for storing scenarios produced by the scenario production section 14, and an input/output management section 16 constituted from an inputting device such as a keyboard or a mouse and a cathode ray tube (CRT) display unit for displaying a list of presentation times, presentation effects and media data so as to allow selection of the user.
The conventional scenario editing apparatus, however, is disadvantageous in that, in order to produce a template of presentation information, the presentation information to make up the template must be inputted piece by piece by means of a keyboard or a mouse. Also it is disadvantageous in that, even where media presentation information which makes an example of presentation information is present already in the form of electronic data, it is impossible to produce a template of presentation information to edit a scenario making use of the data.